Archive for Marketing
Use a product tracking system to optimize the product portfolio
Posted by: | CommentsCompanies like to launch new brands, lines, and brand extensions. These new product launches are usually created by using different package sizes, ingredients, flavors, etc. The strategy behind numerous new product launches is to capture more shelf space or to satisfy the tastes of consumers. As new products come online the product portfolio quickly grows and becomes unmanageable. It costs a lot of overhead to continue to manage large complex product portfolios and when companies find themselves in this situation they start eliminating whole sets of products at once out of desperation. Moves like this usually generate press and sometimes cost CEO’s and Marketing Leaders their jobs. After the product portfolio has been thinned the whole cycle starts again.
If a product tracking system was incorporated into the marketing plan the scenario described above could be eliminated. The system should simply track all products in the product portfolio and monitor each products percentage of overall revenue on a quarterly basis. These percentages can then be incorporated into the annual marketing plan allowing marketers to focus on the top brands and products of the company. By focusing on the top products the company is able to increase overall sales and profitability. This is a wise use of resources that directly affect the bottom line and it allows weaker performing brands, lines, and products to be reduced through sale, liquidation or simply eliminated much quicker.
Use your website to shorten the sales cycle
Posted by: | CommentsSales prospects use company websites to research products before they make purchasing decisions. With prospects visiting websites, looking at your products, and comparing them directly against your competitor’s products, it is very important to make it easy for prospects to get the information they need independently of talking with your sales team.
Your website is one of the most important tools in your marketing program and should be looked at with a very critical eye. Company websites are now the primary marketing tool that consumers use to research products. This means that your website is your most important sales agent that is tasked with providing product information, answering sales questions, and highlighting differences between your products and those from your competitors.
You should visit your website with a very critical eye and make sure that prospects can find the information that is most important to them. Make sure that the product area is easy to navigate to and that product images are crisp, clear, and provide details that competitor’s sites do not. The goal is to get prospects familiar with your products and to answer as many questions as possible about the products and how to buy them.
To make sure that images are easily viewed for details make sure that the product photos are not too small and that they are appropriately sized. A good feature to incorporate is a zoom tool that allows site visitors to zoom into detailed areas of your products. Images also need to be optimized for web delivery so that their file sizes are not too large and too slow for web delivery. Large file sizes with slow download speeds cause people to click away and leave your site.
Finally, remember to include all contact information on every page. If site visitors want to contact a member of your sales team finding out how to do it should not be a challenge. Include information in a highly visible part of every page to make it as easy as possible for them to find.
The time and work spent on your site will help prospects by answering their questions and educating them about your products. It will allow them to better understand your products and help get them to making a buying decision faster.
Develop a plan to get your company to be more customer-focused
Posted by: | CommentsCompanies that consistently deliver more value to their customers also consistently generate higher revenues. Companies should commit to becoming more customer-focused and should develop a plan to consistently examine the value proposition they are offering. This seems to be obvious, but many companies lose sight of customers in their efforts to generate new leads, optimize operations, and boost revenues. Marketers can directly affect the bottom line by developing a plan to become more customer-focused.
To get your company to become more customer-focused marketers should start by getting leader buy-in on the concept. It is critical to get leadership buy-in before launching initiatives and campaigns to the employee base. To get leadership buy in marketers should accumulate case studies where companies have found success by focusing on the customer. These articles and case studies will provide plenty of real-world examples of how customer-focused organizations are successful. Marketers should then develop a customer contact map that highlights how and when customer contact occurs at the company. Present the information to leadership explaining how improvements in the customer contact area and a commitment to become more customer-focused can boost revenues and growth.
With leadership buy-in, an advisory council should be assembled to review and improve all customer contact points. I would suggest that representative from sales and operations are included on the advisory council. Each contact point should be examined with a goal of identifying improvement opportunities. Additionally, ask some of your customers to meet with the advisory council to offer their feedback. Remember, you are trying to improve your value proposition to them so ask them directly what they value. The council should review all available information and then develop an action plan for improvement.
The plan for improvement should be open and celebrated. Tell customers and employees about the company’s new commitment to its customers. Keep people up to date with progress and let leadership know when milestones are met. A serious commitment to the plan will require an adequate budget to make the changes that the advisory council recommends. Also consider that employees that work with the customers may require new training to implement the recommended changes. During the execution of the plan identify employees that excel in the new system and locate people that have a commitment to customer service. Place these people in front of the customer as often as possible.
Finally, getting your company to be more customer-focused is a lot of work. Make the commitment to becoming more customer-focused and think in long terms. It is critically important to start to record and measure successes and failures and always identify opportunities for improvement. Launching an annual customer satisfaction survey can be a great measurement tool to identify opportunities to improve. Another tool to identify opportunities for improvement is to keep your customers active in the customer-commitment plan. A customer advisory board consisting of both large and small customer, if properly managed, can offer brutally honest feedback but it can also greatly improve the company’s customer focus as well as identify new business opportunities.
Becoming a customer-focused company is not easily accomplished but it can be very rewarding. Companies that consistently deliver high value to their customers also consistently generate higher margins and grow much faster than their competitors. It takes much more than just saying that customers are important it takes a serious plan to determine what is important to them.
Competitive intelligence critical component of marketing
Posted by: | CommentsA critical component of a marketing function is to develop a system to organize competitive intelligence. Many companies can focus on their near competitors while ignoring distant competitors and new threats by emerging technologies. Monitoring the competitive landscape is necessary for marketers to develop strategic marketing plans.
To properly collect, assess, and disseminate competitive intelligence, companies should identify a person or office that is responsible for this task. The competitive intelligence expert should be skilled at research and analysis, proficient in internet-based technologies, able to write competitor profiles, and able to analyze information to form accurate conclusions. A process should be developed that regularly near competitors, distant competitors and emerging technologies in the market. A good competitive intelligence profession should be able to able to determine how competitors will think and react during different market scenarios.
It is important for companies to realize that emerging technologies are a greater threat to companies than existing competitors but they also offer great investment opportunities. By monitoring emerging technologies, companies can protect themselves from being blindsided by a new technology or process that renders their basic products or services obsolete. Additionally, if threats from emerging technologies are identified early enough companies have identified an investment opportunity for the future.
To learn more about competitive intelligence visit Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals at http://www.scip.org/
Do you understand your customers?
Posted by: | CommentsMarketers need to have a clear understanding of their target customers? In fact, everybody working at the company should have a clear understanding of their target customers? If there is no clear understanding of customers then the company is in a vulnerable situation and needs to take evasive action or sales will diminish. First, the company should begin a dialogue with its customers to gain basic customer insight and begin to understand how they think, act, and feel. This can be done by visiting their offices, stores, warehouses, and manufacturing facilities in person and having one-on-one conversations. Visits are important but constant contact needs to be initiated through telephone calls, emails, and outings and other relationship building tactics. The key is to begin to build a relationship with the customer. Without this relationship there is no personal connection and they have no “skin in the game.”
While the dialogue building is beginning and the customer relationship is beginning to develop, a more comprehensive market research study should be planned. A detailed market research study should be executed on an annual basis and it should incorporate formal research methodologies such as: on-line surveys, focus groups, in-depth interviews, in-store research, and mystery shopping. All of these methods will increase customer insight tremendously and will move you toward a more thorough understanding of your target customers. When you understand your customers you will be in a better position to understand their needs, perceptions, and preferences. This new understanding will strengthen your relationship, make you more valuable to your target customers, and ultimately increase your sales.
Marketers direct and indirect influence on brand image
Posted by: | CommentsBrands are built and managed by developing marketing programs that establish positive associations with the brand into the memory of consumers and target audiences. This is done by establishing programs in a marketing plan that focus on the favorability of the brand and highlight the niche it serves. When done well, marketers are able to build upon brand equity by emphasizing brand favorability and superiority in serving a market niche. Brands will often take on a life of their own outside of the marketer’s direct control. Because of this, marketers should also monitor and develop strategies to influence factors outside of their control. For instance, brand associations and word-of-mouth exposure are elements that are out of a marketer’s direct control. However, these items are still clearly within a marketer’s realm of influence.
To best influence these nebulous areas, marketers need to conduct competitive benchmarking and understand where their brands stand against competitors in the five P’s of marketing; product, place, price, place, promotion, and people. By understanding the whole space the brand is living in, marketers can not only build programs highlighting the favorable aspects of the brand but they can develop strategies to influence factors outside of their control. For instance, if a brand has developed a strong association as a green product, marketers can work to develop social action programs to improve the environment. By executing a strategy such as this the marketer is influencing word-of-mouth by enhancing the brand’s association with a social movement. This integrated effort between controllable and non-controllable elements of a brand’s image will allow marketers to build brand equity and improve the consumers’ brand experience.
Tell a consistent story with your marketing material and increase sales
Posted by: | CommentsIs your company communicating a consistent story? To confirm, you should conduct a Marketing Message Audit. During the audit you should gather all your marketing materials; sales brochures, presentations, business cards, sales kits, direct mail pieces, press releases, websites, invoices, direct mail pieces, advertising pieces, etc. The collection of pieces should be spread out side by side and compared. During the comparison you should look at logo usage, images, colors, text, examine the copy with an eye on what is content and tone. If the materials do not align in look, feel, and message then it is time to develop a marketing communication strategy to align messages. The marketing department should become the central point of content development to ensure message alignment and brand consistency. It is much easier to maintain standards through a centralized resource in marketing than across multiple departments. With a single voice and message alignment it will become easier for customers to know what you do and you will increase your mindshare which will lead to increased sales.
No one reading your marketing material?
Posted by: | CommentsIf you are having trouble getting consumers to read your marketing material you might try offering them an incentive. Think about all the communication noise you are competing with and it is easy to understand why your messages may be getting glossed over or ignored. However, it is a marketer’s primary job to get their messages out there to improve mindshare and build their brands. To combat the noise in the market place marketers need to find something extra to get the attention of their target audience(s). What better way to do that than to give them something of value? A few techniques that I have seen work are to place instructions on print pieces that drive people to a specific web page where they can enter into a drawing for a prize and if they are already on the web make them search the site for a strategically placed drawing entry form. A well designed incentive offering will help marketers break through market place noise and while building a list of leads. Remember to make the campaign fun and to check into state sweepstakes laws regarding legal restrictions.
Marketing campaigns need to resonate with the sales force…
Posted by: | CommentsMarketers should spend time ensuring that their campaigns resonate with the sales force. As campaigns come and go, marketers should look at the sales force as a key target audience. If the sales force does not understand a campaign, or worse yet do not believe in the campaign, sales will be negatively impacted. To help ensure that there is not only an understanding of new marketing campaigns but buy-in from the sales force as well, marketers should spend time up front to include them and to test the final campaign on them. The sales force is a primary communicator of the marketing campaign and enthusiasm is the goal. The more sales embraces the marketing campaign the more successful the campaign will ultimately be.
